Start Cooking

Everything in its Place ~ Mis en Place The French term mis en place (pronounced MEEZ ahn plahs) comes from professional kitchens and refers to the process of getting everything ready to cook. Home cooks can take a page from the pros here because, although it […]

Michel Guerard’s recipe for a delicious and easy warm tomato tart is the perfect way to use up the last of the summer tomatoes and basil. Adrienne loved Michel’s food and loved tomatoes – so this is a match made in heaven! I think plum […]

The recipe for Tartare de Legumes or Cool Summer Vegetables is a take on guacamole and a wonderful way to serve fresh summer produce with very little effort. It comes via Bistrot des Halles, a traditional French restaurant located near what was the old food market in ‘the […]

Ever since they started travelling to France, Adrienne had wanted a kitchen to cook the food she was drooling over in every market they visited. Marché Forville was about to become her destination food market. In the USA in the late seventies it was still […]

Every year beginning in 1988 six foodie friends got together for a weekend in The Hamptons and cooked their little foodie hearts out! It was called the Dewey Lane Eating Club (DLEC) – after the location of the first event. Adrienne was the architect of the menu and the head […]

This is a quickie version of the Tomate Provençal recipe from Cooking with Adrienne, Volume I. If you are like me, towards the end of winter you are bored with root vegetables and the bounty of summer is a long way off. But you can brighten […]

On one of my first trips to France with Adrienne and Martin in the early Nineties, we literally had champagne and foie gras at almost every meal! Admittedly we were in the Champagne region for the first few days and then in Aquitaine but it all […]

We all know we should be eating more fish. Especially after the holidays most of us are feeling a bit over indulged. But many people feel that cooking fish can be troublesome: there is the smell, and the bones and the not overcooking it. And […]

Adrienne made these lovely menu cards for many of her dinner parties in the late Sixties and Seventies. As I looked through them I noticed there was a salmon dish that appeared regularly but which Adrienne and I had never made together: Mousseline de Saumon. After a bit of […]

I first had a Pissaladière Niçoise at the restaurant Le Nid d’Aigle, in the mountains above Nice. I loved it and not just because of the picturesque moment captured in the photo! When I returned (solo) from my escapade I made it for Adrienne and it became one of our favorites. […]

I had never heard of ‘fluting’ mushrooms until Adrienne’s husband told me this story. In the late Sixties Adrienne took a series of cooking lessons in Paris with Simca Beck, co-author of Mastering the Art of French Cooking. One day she taught Adrienne how to flute […]

“In my next life I want to come back as Adrienne and Martin!” Craig Claiborne was the food editor and restaurant critic for The NY Times and got to know Adrienne and her husband after repeated meetings at restaurants, on airplanes, in cooking events all […]

Making ratatouille in winter may sound perverse but when the ingredients are seasonably available in the summer the last thing you really want to do is spend the afternoon in the kitchen standing over a hot stove. But now as the days are shorter and the cold […]

About Me

Before I met Adrienne (she’s the brunette, I’m the blond) there wasn’t a vegetable out there that I could say I loved…ok, corn on the cob but that probably doesn’t count. And fish, please, I ate it because it was good for you not because I liked it. I saw every main course as an obstacle to dessert!
But something happened when I met Adrienne. Her enthusiasm for cooking, and eating, was infectious. She believed that all food was good food if prepared properly. There wasn’t anything she wouldn’t try once. And if she liked it she would figure out how to recreate it at home. With Adrienne’s help I learned to cook just about anything and her kitchen joie de vivre made it all so much fun.